piracy

Every iOS owner is faced with an important, life-altering decision: to jailbreak their device or not. If you’re not a fan of spending a ton of cumulative money on relatively inexpensive app purchases, you might want to turn to piracy; however, you can’t get pirated apps without jailbreaking your device and relinquishing any of Apple’s official features. Thanks to a Chinese piracy site, though, you can now obtain pirated apps on your device without needing to jailbreak.

Yesterday afternoon, Microsoft creative director Adam Orth was caught having a discussion on Twitter with another game developer about the rumors that the Xbox 720 would require an always-on internet connection to function. His thought on the matter? Players should simply “deal with it.” Since this has been a hot topic lately, the internet swirled into a blind rage as expected, failing to realize that Orth was likely satirically arguing with a personal buddy, and that they were joking around. Calm down, internet.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), the latest attempt by the US legislative branch to hinder online freedom, just received a significant blow from concerned citizens. On the official White House petition site, an anti-CISPA petition has reached 100,000 signatures. That’s not just a big number — it’s the minimum requirement for a mandatory response from the White House.

A new study has found a link between Megaupload’s shutdown and increased digital sales afterward. The impact is modest overall, but this is one of the first studies to examine digital revenues rather than focusing on physical products.

Electronic Arts released a new SimCity a couple of days ago, which happened to be the first new SimCity released in a decade. It was chosen to employ always-on DRM, and with that kind of copy protection combined SimCity’s high profile, the game was sure to be under many a gaze. Any hiccups with the launch was surely going to be noticed. Well, the launch hiccuped all over the place, and the always-on DRM instantly looked like a terrible choice. However, the culprit here isn’t DRM.

April Fools may have come early again this year, thanks to The Pirate Bay. Claiming to have been rehosted in that most closely held of countries, North Korea, could this ironic story actually be strange enough to be true?

Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, Verizon, and Cablevision have all agreed to play ball with the media industry to inconvenience their customers accused of piracy. Few details beyond the “six strikes” policy have been released from any of the ISPs going along with this scheme, but now TorrentFreak has gone public with leaked documents about Verizon’s implementation.

The principal engineer for Nokia’s WP7 and WP8 devices has demonstrated, in rather frank detail, how to pirate Windows 8 Metro apps, how to bypass in-app purchases, and how to remove in-game ads. These hacks aren’t exactly easy, but more worryingly they’re not exactly hard either.

In an amusing twist that undoubtedly spells the end of some hapless manager’s career, Microsoft has accidentally gifted pirates with a free, fully-functioning Windows 8 license key. If you so desire, it is now possible to activate Windows 8 Pro using a legitimate key provided by Microsoft itself.